Songs in Contemporary French Cinema

Soundscapes of Loss: Songs in Contemporary French Cinema

Phil Powrie

ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the use of pre-existing songs from a cultural rather than musicological perspective in a range of film genres. The first part focuses on the musical, particularly on films by Resnais, Ozon and Honoré. The second part explores two major issues in other genres: the increasing frequency of English-language songs, including some sung by French singers, and the way in which French-language songs are used, often in counterpoint to English-language songs. Using Svetlana Boym’s work on nostalgia, I show how French songs serve as markers of family and community, and as an anxious appeal for reparation from loss in the musicals and other genres I cover. English-language songs on the other hand tend to indicate the fragmentation of that same community, but do not look back in sadness.

KEYWORDS
songs
musicals
nostalgia
community
Americanisation
Resnais
Ozon
Honoré
Boym

Soundtrack studies have been a well-established field of cinema studies since the 1980s. Much of the work on soundtracks in the French cinema focuses on films appearing before the mid-1980s, for example the realist singers of the 1930s or jazz scores in the New Wave. Pre-existing popular music in contemporary French films has had rather less attention devoted to it than is the case for Hollywood or British cinema. The focus has almost exclusively been on music associated with banlieue or Maghrebi-French films, such as hip-hop and raï, and, to the extent that they use pre-composed songs, musicals appearing since the mid-1990s, with films by Alain Resnais, François Ozon, Christophe Honoré, and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau.
This chapter will build on previous work to explore the use of mainly pre-existing songs from a cultural rather than musicological perspective in a range of film genres. Many films are dominated by French popular songs, broadly of two types: first, songs sung in English by French singers; second French songs from two specific periods: the 1930s and 1960-1980. The songs in French, and especially songs from these periods, serve a nostalgic function within the films, as indeed they do in Hollywood compilation soundtracks. I will pay particular attention to end-credits songs and signature songs, and show how French songs serve as markers of family and community, and as an anxious appeal for reparation from loss. But French film soundtracks are increasingly dominated by the English (or more usually) American idiom. English-language songs tend to indicate the fragmentation of that same community, but do not look back in sadness.

The Contemporary Musical

The musical was a key genre in the 1940s and 1950s with the big band films of Ray Ventura, and the operetta spectaculars of Tino Rossi and Luis Mariano. It saw a new lease of life with the musicals of Jacques Demy during the 1960s, but with the exception of two musicals by Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman in the 1970s and 1980s respectively, it disappeared until the mid-1990s when several successful art-house musicals by auteur-directors were released. In the 2000s, there have been mainstream films that are close to musicals, focused on the music-hall (Faubourg 36 / Paris 36 [Christophe Barratier, 2008]), or a singer, such as bio-pics on Claude Francois (Cloclo / My Way [Florent-Emilio Siri, 2012]) and Édith Piaf (La Môme / La Vie en rose [Olivier Dahan, 2007]), and Quand j’étais chanteur / The Singer, Xavier Giannoli, 2006). The last two won Césars, suggesting a resurgence of the musical genre.
These mainstream films clearly reference the past. La Vie en Rose recycles Piaf’s songs and My Way those of Claude François. In The Singer, a film about an ageing dance-hall singer, we hear sixteen songs, most of them sung by Gérard Depardieu, and most of them from the 1960s and 1970s by popular singers such as Christophe, Michel Delpech, Serge Gainsbourg, Daniel Guichard, and Sylvie Vartan. Paris 36 is about a music hall at the crucial juncture of the Popular Front in 1936. Although its songs were all composed specifically for the film, they are in the idiom of popular songs of the period. In addition, there are many transparent references to key films of the 1930s such as Le Quai des brumes / Port of Shadows (Marcel Carné, 1938), Le Jour se lève / Daybreak (Marcel Carné, 1939), and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange / The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936).
The most striking feature of auteur musicals since the 1990s is their obvious connection to the past, more often than not to past stage or film musicals, and, crucially, to the films of Jacques Demy. Pas sur la bouche / Not on the Lips (Alain Resnais, 2003) is a reworking of a 1925 stage operetta. The actors sing the songs themselves as musical numbers, whereas in On connaît la chanson / Same Old Song (Alain Resnais, 1997), the actors lip-synch 36 snippets of pre-recorded French pop songs of which about a third are pre-1940, e.g., those sung by Arletty, Josephine Baker, Dranem, Henri Garat, Gaston Ouvrard, and Édith Piaf. Most of the songs, however, are from the mid-1960s to early 1980s, sung by Charles Aznavour, Alain Bashung, Gilbert Bécaud, Jane Birkin, Julien Clerc, Dalida, Jacques Dutronc, France Gall, Johnny Hallyday, Serge Lama, Michel Sardou, Alain Souchon, and Sylvie Vartan. As one commentator points out, the absence of contemporary French singers makes this film “un film de vieux” (a film for older people); it is “a film that refuses to sacrifice a certain memory of things and of the world to the cult of the contemporary.” As Emma Wilson says, Not on the Lips “echoes Resnais’s concern more broadly to trace past sensations and moments of being, to watch them take form on film, in memory and fantasy, then allow them to dissipate, to disappear. His filmmaking testifies to such hesitations between memory and forgetting.”
8 Femmes / 8 Women, François Ozon, 2002) also faces towards the past. The narrative, from a mediocre boulevard play by Robert Thomas first produced in Paris in 1961, is thin and no more than a pretext to showcase the eight actresses, several of them serving as a vehicle for “cinematographic memory.” The film was directly inspired by George Cukor’s The Women (1939) for the narrative and the frequently caustic dialogue, and by Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas for the decor and color palette. There are moreover multiple references to the films of Truffaut through Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant, as well as transparent references to Les Demoiselles de Rochefort / The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967) in the mother-daughter relationship of Deneuve and Danielle Darrieux. And, as was the case for Resnais, the songs sung by the actresses were sung by female performers popular in the 1960s and 1970s (Coryne Charby, Dalida, Françoise Hardy, Marie Laforêt, Nicoletta, Sheila, Sylvie Vartan).
While Resnais and Ozon share a fascination with songs popular some thirty to forty years before their film musicals, the songs in the films of Christophe Honoré and Olivier Ducastel / Jacques Martineau were composed for their films. Nonetheless, these films are clear homages to those of Jacques Demy, as reviewers were quick to point out. Jeanne et le garçon formidable formidable / Jeanne and the Perfect Guy (Olivier Ducastel/Jacques Martineau, 1998) is “half-way between the enchanted world of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort and the anchoring in the social world of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy, 1964] or Une Chambre en ville [A Room in Town, Jacques Demy, 1982],” and it is “the film that Jacques Demy would have made if he were twenty years old today.” Ducastel and Martineau specifically painted Olivier’s hospital room a Demy-like blue, and Olivier is played by Mathieu Demy, Jacques Demy’s son. But the main parallel is the anchoring in the banal gestures and events of the everyday, encapsulated by a transparent Demy reference when Jeanne drinks a cup of tea and sings “pass me the sugar, it’s too bitter,” echoing the “pass me the salt” of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Crustacés et Coquillages / Côte d’Azur (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2005) only has three songs, and is therefore only tenuously a musical; but the décor of the repainted villa at the end of the film and the colors of the costumes in the finale all echo Demy. Moreover, the title of the film and the songs that all revolve around the title are a direct reference to Brigitte Bardot’s 1962 song, “La Madrague.” The film’s songs gently parody Bardot’s in much the same way that the narrative parodies vaudeville farces with its focus entirely and relentlessly on sex: the father of the family rediscovers the male lover of his youth, the son wrestles with his possible homosexuality, the mother’s lover keeps popping up unexpectedly, and everyone is outed in the utopian finale with its Demy-like costumes and singing actors.
The frame of reference of Les Chansons d’amour / Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, 2007) similarly is broader than just the films of Demy, as it references the New Wave more generally. Honoré said in interview that he felt close to the New Wave aesthetic. Three sharing the same bed is a clear allusion to La Maman et la Putain / The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973), Julie’s white coat to Anna Karina in the semi-musical Une Femme est une femme / A Woman Is A Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961), and three characters reading under the bedcovers to Baisers volés / Stolen Kisses (François Truffaut, 1968). But Demy is present throughout, and Honoré repeatedly stressed how Lola (Jacques Demy, 1961) was one of his key films. He himself drew attention to the way in which Love Songs’ tripartite structure recalls The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Les Bien-Aimés / Beloved (Christophe Honoré, 2011) reprises the Demy references: the opening credits of criss-crossing feet that echo the criss-crossing umbrellas of the opening credits of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and there are frequent splashes of Demy-inspired blues in the décor.
All of these auteur musicals rework their source material and update it, by their AIDS narratives in the case of Jeanne et le Garçon formidable / Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, Love Songs, and Beloved, and by the feminist frames of reference for Ozon and Resnais; indeed, Resnais described Not on the Lips as a “feminist operetta.” But ultimately they present themselves as doubly nostalgic gestures: first, to the operetta genre that was dominant in the 1935-1955 period on both stage and screen; and second, in the case of Resnais and Ozon, to popular songs of the 1960s in particular, and in the case of Honoré and Ducastel/Martineau, to a filmmaker, Demy, whose major successes were all in the 1960s. As we shall see, the thirty years stretching from the 1960s through the 1980s play an equally important role in compilation soundtracks.

Songs in Contemporary Non-musical Films: Theoretical and Methodological Issues

The research presented in the remainder of this chapter is based on an analysis of fifty films from a range of genres, including most of the top twenty best-selling films of the decade, the rest being randomly selected. The sample does not include heritage films, since these tend to use pre-existing classical music or incidental music in the same idiom. The intention is that this corpus, approximately two per cent of the films appearing since 2000, should act as a representative sample of contemporary French film production.
Not all films use compilation soundtracks. Les Bronzés 3: amis pour la vie / Friends Forever (Patrice Leconte, 2006), for example, has songs specifically composed for the film by Etienne Perruchon. A quarter only use incidental instrumental music composed specifically for the film. There are also films not in the heritage genre that use pre-existing instrumental classical music. A case in point is the erotic drama Choses secrètes / Secret Things (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2002), with its compilation of Baroque music by Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel that serves to mark the depravity of the wealthy libertine with whom the two heroines become entangled. At the other end of the spectrum, some films use nothing but diegetic songs, either sung by the characters, or heard as part of the sonic decor, such as in bars or dancehalls.
Films with songs entirely in English are not frequent in the sample. There are two instances, both thrillers: L’Homme qui voulait vivre sa vie / The Big Picture (Eric Lartigau, 2010), and Ne le dis à personne / Tell No One (Guillaume Canet, 2006), but there are other thrillers whose soundtracks combine both English and French, for example Entre ses mains / In His Hands (Anne Fontaine, 2005), considered below. The majority of films in the sample combine both English and French; however, of the thirty films that have more than a couple of songs, two thirds of them have more songs in English than in French, suggesting a major shift in soundtrack design.
One of the key theoretical concerns of soundtrack theorists has been the relationship between diegetic and non-diegetic music. In the case of the musicals discussed in the previous section, all songs are diegetic, although clearly Same Old Song is a special case, as the sounds emerging from the actors’ mouths are in principle non-diegetic. But this points to the fact that the diegetic/non-diegetic categorization is not helpful for pre-existing songs, as many scholars have recently discussed. What matters is the power of the music in conjunction with the image. As Ben Winters points out, music can play an active role in the narrative, even if the characters are not supposed to be able to hear it. Music can respond to the presence of characters or to specific events in the narrative. Indeed, Winters suggests that we could conceive of “characters radiating music,” and he boldly aligns film with opera, suggesting how small the gap is between the musicals dealt with in the first section of this chapter and the compilation soundtrack films I am now considering.
Some songs are worth analyzing in detail because attention is drawn to them: they may be repeated; they may occur at key narrative or stylistic moments; they may be one of the few, indeed, sometimes, they may be the only song in the film. These songs, I contend, have a thickness that makes them more than just functional; I shall call them signature songs. They are likely to be the song that you remember as you recall the film. Like a musical signature, they give the key to the film, its emotional signature.
Michel Chion is broadly right when he claims that music impels us to interpret the image. But, signature songs suggest that the music can become as important, and possibly more important than the visual image they accompany. In that sense, the music becomes “iconic,” a term more usually applied to something one sees. It is the kind of effect described by Robynn Stilwell whereby music “surpass(es) the voice/verbal into a sort of metadiegetic sublime soaring above the diegesis.” In such cases, we should invert the terms: the visual image accompanies the music. Songs and the contexts within which they occur mean that often we hear before we see; we hear the tone, the emotion before we understand how the narrative situation is asking us to construct it. This hearing produces emotion in synchresis with the image. The synchretic combination is important. Such pieces of music played without the image and the narrative context do not always seem to have the same haptic and emotive force.
The research presented below also leads to a second important taxonomic emphasis, that of the end-credits song (which can also be a signature song). Whereas most songs in a film encourage us to interpret the images we see, and therefore a specific section of the film, the end-credits song functions more as a comment on the film as a whole. If it reprises a song heard earlier in the film, it elevates that song to the status of definitive appraisal, singling out by its repetition a key moment or feeling of the film, and thereby establishing the moral of the film. An excellent example is the title song of Quand j’étais chanteur, which Depardieu sings in the dance-hall, intercut with the end-credits. We then see him in his studio reprising the final refrain without musical accompaniment, expressing the moral of the film, the past pleasures and the “truth” of songs (he had said earlier in the film that “songs tell the whole truth”):

Pour moi, il y a longtemps qu'c'est fini.
Je comprends plus grand'chose, aujourd'hui
Mais j'entends quand même des choses que j'aime
Et ça distrait ma vie... It was all over for me a long time ago.
I don’t understand much these days

But I still hear things I like

And it keeps me going…

One could argue therefore that just as the opening-credits song of a film (and opening-credits music more generally) is key to setting the tone and establishing narrative lines, with or without accompanying images, an end-credits song similarly confirms what we have seen and heard, as it brings closure to the film. This is all the more the case given that typically end-credits are not accompanied by images, our attention thus being drawn much more to the music than for opening credits.
I shall refer to the signature song and the end-credits song as I present the case studies, which are structured in three groups: films where there is a preponderance of songs in French; those where the preponderance is English; and finally those where there is a final song in French after a soundtrack consisting of preponderantly English-language songs.

French-language Songs

A few films have songs that are entirely French. Often these are period films, although not falling into the genre of the heritage film, such as Paris 36. The 1930s setting of La Femme de Gilles / Gilles’ Wife (Frédéric Fonteyne, 2004) motivates a soundtrack comprising music from the film La Kermesse héroïque / Carnival in Flanders (Jacques Feyder, 1935), and one of Mistinguett’s most famous songs, “Mon homme” (My Man), first published as early as 1916.
In films set in the present, the songs also function nostalgically. In Fauteuils d’orchestre / Orchestra Seats (Danièle Thompson, 2006) all the songs are sung by Claudie, the stage manager, who sings along to songs from the 1960s-1970s: this starts appropriately with “Les Comédiens” (Actors, Charles Aznavour, 1962), and includes songs by Gilbert Bécaud and Juliette Greco. About to retire, Claudie tells the young provincial-ingénue Jessica nostalgically that these are her favorite singers (we see posters of them in her loggia) and that she knew them all, thus doubly evoking their materiality in the past: as real singers within a fiction and as voices that her ageing and retiring body embodies.
Camping (Fabien Onteniente, 2006) evokes the camping holiday popular since the 1960s to this day. The soundtrack is anchored in the 1980s. The opening credits are accompanied by “Dolce vita” sung by Ryan Paris. Although both song and singer are Italian, the song was a world-wide hit in 1983, and sets the 1980s tone for the soundtrack, which includes a couple of songs by Claude Barzotti, an Italian working in France, whose “Le Rital” was a major hit in 1981 and is included in this film. But the gestures to the 1980s are more complex; Barzotti composed a song for the 1985 film À nous les garçons / Here Come the Boys (Michel Lang, 1985), which starred the star and co-writer of Camping, Franck Dubosc. And the period evoked is complicated by the song we hear over the final credits, Sacha Distel’s “La Belle Vie” / The Good Life). Like the opening credits song, this is clearly intended as a comment on camping as a leisure activity. Distel also sings “T'es partie en vacances” (You’ve Gone on Holiday) in another well-known camping film, Nous irons à Deauville / We Will Go to Deauville (Francis Rigaud, 1962), which itself was an attempt to replicate the top-selling French film of 1950, Nous irons à Paris / We Will All Go to Paris (Jean Boyer, 1950), a musical produced by Ray Ventura and starring him and his orchestra. The film may have been ridiculed by critics, but the sedimentary layering of the soundtrack and its connotations give it a potent depth and complexity: nostalgia created by the songs is kept in tension with the irony of character stereotypes.
Camping could not be more different than the melancholic C’est la vie (Jean-Pierre Améris, 2001), which stars the ex-singer Jacques Dutronc as Dimitri, a man living his last few days in a hospice as he dies of cancer. In one respect, however, there is a similarity. Apart from an opening diegetic song in Russian which we interpret as the mother singing to the young Dimitri, and a couple of Spanish and Italian songs, the songs are in French and they are all diegetic, either because we hear them in the background in bars and discos, or because the characters sing them. The first song in French, by Les Têtes raides, although relatively recent, sets the nostalgic tone, as its title indicates: “Le Cœur a sa mémoire” (The Heart Has Its Memory, 1998). The songs that stand out in what follows include songs by Edith Piaf and Fréhel, with the end-credits song, after Dimitri has died, being Mouloudji’s 1954 “Un jour tu verras” (One Day You’ll See), sung by Dutronc.
The film also contains a signature song in a long sequence during which Dimitri and Suzanne, the helper at the hospice, both karaoke, equally badly, to Piaf’s “Mon Manège à moi” (My Own Merry-Go-Round), which functions as a declaration of their love to each other (see Figure 1). Her sense of loss at his death will be all the greater. As we shall see, signature songs whether in English or French generally signal loss and the nostalgia that accompanies loss.
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A similarly pointed use of a French song can be found in Entre ses mains (Anne Fontaine, 2005), a film about the relationship between a serial killer and the woman who befriends him. The music in the film for the most part comprises English dance music heard as background in bars and discos. Half an hour into the film, the killer accompanies Claire to a bar where she karaokes in a lengthy sequence to Jacques Dutronc’s “J’aime les filles” (I Love Girls). On the surface, the song seems to be echoing the desire of the serial killer for his victims. But in this case, it is Claire who sings the song, badly, but enjoying herself, making herself even more of a victim than she might otherwise have done by opening up to the man whom the audience suspects might well be the killer; she herself will come to that realization only a few minutes after this song. But the song is not just there for dramatic irony. The narrative is about her understanding the killer’s drives, and perversely loving him for what he is. At the end of the film, they make love; he kills himself rather than harm her. The karaoke sequence is thus emblematic: she manages to see through his eyes by singing a song that is ostensibly about his murderous desires. It functions as the tipping point between innocence (emblematized by Claire’s name) and the darkness of her perverse relationship with the serial killer. Like so many French songs, and all the signature songs, it is about loss, in this case the loss of innocence and her “purity” as an about-to-be-unfaithful wife.
An end-credits song assumes considerably more weight when the rest of the soundtrack’s music is unremarkable. This is the case for Potiche / Trophy Wife (François Ozon, 2010), in whose final sequence Madame Pujol, played by Catherine Deneuve, the “trophy wife” of the title, is voted in as the region’s deputée (congresswoman). She takes the microphone and sings “C’est beau la vie” (Life is Beautiful), walking through the crowd as she does so, the song extending into the final credits sequence. Quite apart from celebrating her success, as the title of the song suggests, and the value of community, one of the key themes of the film, as her walk through the crowd suggests, the song has the sedimentary depth explored above. The song was made famous in 1964 by Isabelle Aubret, who had won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1962. But it is not just about a woman succeeding in the public sphere, and thus echoing Pujol’s success in the film. Aubret was chosen by Jacques Demy as the lead for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a role that fell to the young Catherine Deneuve when Aubret had a serious car accident; the song was composed for Aubret by Jean Ferrat as she was going through a series of major operations after the accident. The song thus functionally, if somewhat melodramatically, articulates a woman’s rise to fame and power, as well as maintaining a career against all odds; but in so doing refers us back, as so many soundtracks do, to the 1960s, and in this case pointedly to the Golden Age of the New Wave musical. Indeed, most of the songs discussed in this section are located in the past, and their function is to articulate pain for what has been lost.

English-language Songs

English-language songs, on the other hand, serve a different function. In Prête-moi ta main / I Do (Éric Lartigau, 2006), which is a rom-com about a bachelor harassed by his family to take a wife, hiring a woman to act the part, and then falling for her, Kool and the Gang sing “You Can Have My Heart if You Want It” over the closing credits, signaling the heterosexual closure associated with rom-coms. In Comme t’y es belle / Hey Good Looking! (Liza Azuelos, 2006), a comedy focusing on a family of three sisters and their friends, we hear an eclectic mix of songs during the film, by Laurent Voulzy, Celine Dion, Keren Ann, and Daniel Levi in French, and Diana Ross and Kylie Minogue in English; the end-credits song is Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” pointedly subscribing to the film’s celebration of an extended community with all its ups and downs. In another family film, LOL (Laughing Out Loud) (Liza Azuelos, 2009), we hear songs by English bands The Rolling Stones, Blur, and Supergrass, and “Lola” (1970) by Ray Davies (although sung by Jean-Philippe Verdin in English) over the final credits, Lola being the name of the teenage heroine. Les Petits Mouchoirs / Little White Lies (Guillaume Canet, 2010), an ensemble film focusing on a group of friends coming to terms with the death of one of their group, has a soundtrack of mainly English-language songs (The Band, The Isley Brothers, David Bowie, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Janis Joplin). At the funeral at the end of the film, and into the end-credits sequence, we hear a version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” (sung by Nina Simone in 1972), reflecting the dead man’s waywardness; this gives way to Sixto Rodriguez’s “Crucify Your Mind” (1970), its lyrics possibly to be taken as a satirical comment on the selfishness of the group of friends, of which they are made aware just prior to the funeral (“But I’ve seen your self-pity showing/As the tears rolled down your cheeks”). In these four films, it could be argued that the songs are no more than functional; they comment transparently on the film’s actions or characters (even if the comment is often superficial. Davies’s “Lola,” for example, is about a transvestite, which has no relevance for the Lola in the film: “But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man/And so is Lola”). But in another sense, the context in the films is future-facing rather than nostalgically retrospective, as the French songs tend to be, not least because most of the songs we hear – “Lola” is very much an exception to the rule – are more contemporary than the French songs.
There are also, as in the films dominated by French songs, signature songs, this time in English. In Paris (Cédric Klapisch, 2008), Pierre, a young professional cabaret dancer, is dying. He rummages through his things, looking fondly at old photographs of his past. He finds a filmstrip of himself, and we see it playing in his mind as he dances in a lurid pink costume at Le Moulin Rouge. As he does so, we do not hear the music to which he is dancing, but the aptly titled “Seize the Day,” by trip-hop composer Wax Tailor, playing on the turntable next to him. The music is slow, and out of synch with the activity on the Moulin Rouge stage. Although the words are sung in English, both the singer and the composer, Charlotte Savary and Jean-Christophe Le Saoût respectively, are French. Functional in appearance – the song is exhorting Pierre to make the most of the time that remains – it is arguably far more. Apart from background songs at Pierre’s party, it is the only song in the film, and the waiflike quality of Savary’s voice lends both a sense of innocence to Pierre’s retrieval of his past, and pathos because he and we know he is about to die. The song is the fulcrum of the film, the moment when his past and his present tip over into the slide towards inevitable death. More importantly, it paradoxically signals his acceptance of death, as the oddly ungrammatical lyrics of the song emphasize:

Seize the day
I don’t mind whatever happens
(…)
There’s applause
There’ll be encores
You’re sincere
That’s what we’re
Have no fear

A similar, and considerably more stunning future-focused fulcrum point occurs in De rouille et d’os / Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012), a film dominated by very recent American pop songs. Stéphanie loses her legs in an accident at work where she trains killer whales. She slowly comes to terms with her disability after almost committing suicide. She befriends Ali who had taken a shine to her before her accident. They make love, finally restoring her self-esteem. The following morning she sits in her wheelchair on her balcony slowly and then more rapidly and expansively making the hand gestures she used to control the killer whales as we hear Katy Perry’s “Firework,” which had been playing just before the accident (see Figure 2). The song tells her that she is a firework, that she does not “have to feel like a waste of space,” and exhorts her to “let [her] colors burst.” The song soundbridges as we see her walking back into her place of work, indicating that she has put her past trauma behind her. This instance is more stunning than Paris because the gradual crescendo of music and gestures allows Stéphanie to become anew a performing body facing into the future. In Paris Pierre merely looks at his performing body fixed on celluloid; as Wax Tailor sings Pierre re-imagines his performance without the original music, the disjunction between the fondly remembered past and the melancholy of the present emphasized by his posture, sitting quietly on the floor. Stéphanie, in contrast, moves her body to the rhythm of the music; she acts out a performance previously located in the past, but here presented as a joyful epiphany: she has accepted her body’s limitations, and returns to work.
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In Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas / Don’t Worry, I’m Fine (Philippe Lioret, 2006), a single diegetic song, “U-turn (Lili),” dominates the film. The film is about how Lili, in her earlier twenties, who has a twin singer-songwriter brother, is led to believe that he has broken with the family. But this is a ploy by her parents to avoid her breaking down completely should she know the truth: that he has died in a senseless climbing accident while on holiday. We hear the song he has composed especially for her while she has been away three times during the film: first, on her return; second when their father listens to it alone in his car while his daughter lies in hospital, refusing to eat; and then finally, as one might expect, over the end-credits. The song is in English, but the singer-songwriter is the Frenchman Simon Buret, one half of the duo AaRon. “U-turn (Lili)” brought the duo to national attention; it was the top iTunes download for a month, which suggests the impact it had in the film. Three features are noteworthy: the soulful minor tune, Buret’s raspy voice, and a haunting and enigmatic refrain:

For every step in any walk
any town of any thought
I’ll be your guide

for every street of any scene
any place you’ve never been
I’ll be your guide

The song functions as the sonic representation of a body that has disappeared, and who will turn out by the end of the film to have died. Thanks to the graininess of his voice, the singer’s body is all the more immediately present, “guiding” his sister.
Lila dit ça / Lila Says (Ziad Doueiri, 2005) is a drama of the love between two teenagers in Marseille. Lili is white, and sexually precocious, although a virgin; her boyfriend Chimo is a sensitive and shy Maghrebi youth. The score is complex, with instrumental music by UK composer Nitin Sawhney, and a range of pre-existing music including an instrumental by William Orbit, a song by The Starseeds, and finally two pieces by the New York singer-songwriter Vanessa Daou. But it is Daou and her music that are foregrounded. Lila gives Chimo a copy of Daou’s 1995 album Zipless (Songs from the Work of Erica Jong) – the shot is sufficiently close that we can make out the CD cover – from which we hear one of her most suggestively erotic tracks, “Near the Black Forest,” to which Chimo listens by himself. The “black forest” of the title, given the song’s music video with her dancing seductively surrounded by black men, is likely to be understood as a reference to interracial relationships. It therefore underscores the narrative, but also, given Daou’s heavily aspirated singing style, emphasizes the sexually suggestive comments constantly made by the precocious Lila. Some ten minutes later in the film, Lila sings along to “If I Could” from Daou’s 1996 album, Slow to Burn, just after she has offered oral sex to Chimo: “If I could climb inside of you/I’d look out from your eyes/To see the world you do.” Daou’s breathy voice and suggestive lyrics make her a palimpsest for Lila, who is obsessed with US life and culture. Lila’s precociousness gets her into trouble: she is raped by Chimo’s friends, and leaves town, although Chimo receives a letter from her subsequently.
These songs seem to have much the same emotional value attached to them as the French songs, in that they appear to give shape to loss: loss of life, loss of a beloved brother, loss of an absent lover. But context is all. The songs, sometimes counter-intuitively as in the case of Paris, signal not nostalgia, but an attitude that is future-facing. Pierre accepts that he is dying and takes what he can from the time left; Lili learns how to accept her brother’s death, and the lyrics of the song suggest that he will be with her always; Chimo knows that he will see Lila again.

The Final Song in French

There are a number of films where the soundtrack is English overall, but the end-credits song is unexpectedly French, and generally not contemporary. I would suggest that the function of the French song is to re-establish traditional values after a narrative that is anchored in contemporary attitudes. The song can be about the future, or future-facing; it can also be about the loss of values past. But in either case, French is used when traditional values are at stake.
Le Premier Jour (du reste de ta vie) / The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (Rémi Besançon, 2008), articulated around five key days in the life of a nuclear family, is heavily invested in English-language songs. The father and one of the sons are keen rock music fans; the daughter mixes with an aspiring rock band. Father and son argue about who is the best lead guitarist in the world, and all those mentioned are American or British. The daughter’s voice-over diary states that “Kurt Cobain has died.” We see (French) bands performing songs in English, and we hear a variety of songs sung by Janis Joplin, David Bowie, and The Divine Comedy. At the end of the film, Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” accompanies the casting of the father’s ashes into sea. True, the mother is accompanied by some jazz-inspired songs in French; but they are sung by UK jazz singer Blossom Dearie, with a strong English accent, and one of them, “Plus je t’embrasse” (The More I Kiss You), is in fact the French adaptation of an English-language song, “Gang That Sang Heart of My Heart.” The end-credits song, however, is in French; it is the title song, dating from 1998, sung by Etienne Daho. It also refers to a statement written in her diary by Fleur, the daughter, earlier in the film, referring to her loss of virginity, and the song starts before the end-credits, just after her father’s funeral, as she learns that she is pregnant. The upbeat song celebrates the continuity of a family that had often seemed to be on the brink of dispersal.
There is a similar pattern in the American-flavored rom-com L’Amour à deux c’est mieux / The Perfect Date (Dominique Farrugia/Arnaud Lemort, 2010). When Michel and Angèle start getting together, we hear Al Green’s “Simply Beautiful” (“You got to be good to me/I’m going to be good to you”). The songs comment on the ups and downs of the couple; there is Outkast’s “Hey Ya” (“You think you’ve got it. Ohh, you think you’ve got it/ But got it just don’t get it”), later followed by Obadiah Parker’s soulful version of the same song. When the couple gets together again, we hear Queen’s “Don’t stop me now;” and then later Blood Sweat and Tears’s “Spinning Wheel” (“What goes up must come down”). These English-language songs parallel the couple’s relationship; but when final closure and togetherness occur, the film’s final song is unexpectedly French: Thomas Dutronc sings “Tu es la seule, seule seule” (You’re the only one), re-establishing the romantic couple. While the song may appear to have much the same function as “You Can Have My Heart if You Want It” at the end of Prête-moi ta main, the sudden switch to French after a totally English-language compilation arguably pulls us back into the past, not least because as is well-known in France, Dutronc’s parents are both singers whose work is located in the past: Françoise Hardy and Jacques Dutronc.
Tout ce qui brille / All That Glitters (Hervé Mimran and Géraldine Nakache, 2010) is about two teenage girls and the ups and downs of their friendship, epitomized by the frequently repeated scene of them running off without paying the taxi fare. The music in the film is comprised of four songs by the UK hip-hop/garage band, The Streets, fittingly so, given that the girls spend much of their time wandering across Paris. This contemporary music (“Fit But You Know It,” which we hear in the film, was fourth in the UK 2004 charts six years before the film’s release) is counterpointed with a repeated song by French singer Véronique Sanson from the 1970s, “Chanson sur une drôle de vie” (Song About a Funny Life). This is used for both opening and closing credits, and extensively during sequences where the two friends are closest. It functions as their anthem of friendship, and the fact that it is in French and some thirty years old anchors that friendship in the past-ness of childhood, vividly contrasted with the street-savvy urban sound of the English songs.
The soundtrack for Ensemble, c’est tout / Hunting and Gathering (Claude Berri, 2007) is interestingly gendered. Camille and Franck are flatmates, and eventually become a couple. Camille listens to classical music, Franck to very loud English rock by Hard-Fi. They clash over the music, Camille throwing Franck’s hifi out of the window when she has had enough. But the film also uses a well-known song by Yves Montand, “La Bicyclette” (The Bicycle), dating from 1968. The song lists a number of male names, followed by “Et puis Paulette” (And then there was Paulette), which is the name of a secondary character, Franck’s ailing grandmother. Nothing would be more natural than to use a song to echo the presence of a subsidiary character, partly to give that character more substance. But Paulette is in fact key to the narrative. Her grandson dotes on her and cares for her. The animosity between Camille and Franck is overcome when she looks after her as well as, if not better than Franck, bringing them together as a couple. The song is heard two-thirds of the way into the film as the flatmates and Paulette drive to the country and eventually take Paulette back to her house, where she would rather be than the home we see her in at the start of the film. We see Paulette as we hear Montand sing “on était tous amoureux d’elle” (we all loved her). The scene echoes the title of the film, that of togetherness, of the couple, of friendships, and of family, although a family that is a community of friends; what is more, it occurs in the countryside, in an iconic and familiar gesture in French culture that opposes the urban (Paris, where the friends live and work), and the rural, associated with an older generation. The song, the only French song of the film, returns at the end to accompany Paulette’s funeral, mourning the passing of a generation and its values.

Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to account for the curious dominance of English songs in compilation soundtracks for contemporary French films, and to try to identify the function of pre-existing music in contemporary films more generally. French songs in the sample are overwhelmingly taken from periods that are “historical:” the 1930s and the thirty years stretching from 1960, with a strong emphasis on the 1960s and early 1970s. In the case of those film musicals in which the songs are contemporary creations, the films seem to compensate for that contemporariness by anchoring other aspects of the film (the narrative, the decor) in the 1960s musicals of Demy. Contemporary English songs, however, including songs sung in English by French performers, have increasingly dominated soundtracks in the 2000s.
French songs, both in musicals and other genres, are used to evoke nostalgia and pathos. Emotion is anchored in pastness and passingness: previous decades are evoked, characters die or retire to the sound of songs sung 40-80 years ago. That one of music’s primary functions is to evoke nostalgia is no surprise, and has been well theorized; Caryl Flinn points out how music can function as “memory fragments, partial leftovers that can point to something but never be commensurate with it.” Many of the films focus on communities and loss. Fauteuils d’orchestre is about a micro-community of artists whose lives and loves crisscross, the most affecting sequence arguably being Claudie’s retirement as she evokes the glories gone past. The major plotline of Camping is about the upper-class plastic surgeon who has nothing but contempt for the working-class camping holiday and those he meets there; but he comes to terms with the community, albeit ephemeral, formed during the summer months, learning how to appreciate and respect the members of that community, despite their class differences. Similarly, the prickly Dimitri in C’est la vie, comes to appreciate how those in the hospice squeeze as much life as they have left from interactions with others.
While French songs therefore suggest the loss of an ideal community, English songs tend to indicate the fracture of community or family without the appeal to the past and its ideals, but with a much more future-facing attitude. Curiously, in films where the soundtrack is dominated by English songs, we frequently hear a final French song, generally from the past, that returns us to values that might be considered more traditional. In that sense, the songs in these films articulate and work through the contemporary transition away from concepts of the traditional family and the precarious coalition of individuals within broader “tribal” communities.
What these songs also indicate is something considerably more diffuse than the historical specificities explored by Naomi Greene in her analysis of contemporary French cinema’s obsession with the national past. They do not gesture to specific events, such as World War II or Vichy. They are, rather, about something more intangible: national identity. More specifically, they are about the tension in French culture (whether artistic culture or social culture) between France and the USA. This stretches from the culture wars around the moving picture at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the Americanization of French culture in the post-war period so well analyzed by Kristin Ross, to French anxieties in the latter half of the century about what has frequently been called the “Macdonaldization” of French culture.
Svetlana Boym’s work on nostalgia provides a useful framework for thinking through how songs function in these films. She points out how the object of nostalgia is elusive, and proposes that it is “an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.” She makes a key distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. The former is about the restoration of the lost home, about tradition, while reflective nostalgia “does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity,” and “points to the future.” I would suggest that this distinction could be fruitfully applied to the use of French songs from “historical” periods (restorative) and Anglophone songs from the very recent past (reflective). To put it more simply, French songs in contemporary French cinema are past-facing (witness the prevalence of French songs prior to the 1990s in all the films); English songs are future-facing (witness the prevalence of mostly contemporary songs in English).
I conclude from this study that as the soundtrack in contemporary French films is becoming in some respects more “American,” it appears to mitigate the dilution of cultural specificity that this might imply through the painful re-articulation of the past in what we could call, taking a cue from Greene’s work, “soundscapes of loss.” Both Greene and Boym refer to the important work of Pierre Nora around what he calls “lieux de mémoire,” locations, events, or symbols that embody national memory. As has been noted, the objects of Nora’s study are not those of popular culture. This is why, as a complement to my coinage of “soundscapes of loss,” I would like to end by proposing that many of the restorative songs used in films, those that were produced in “historical” periods, function as “sons de mémoire:” nostalgia for a lost way of life under the pressure of Americanization, nostalgia for the family that fragile “tribal” communities are replacing.
That mere songs in a film soundtrack can convey the intangible affects that circulate around and percolate through the swirl of collective memory and national identity is testament to the raw power of music and voice.